Author
Topic: : Lighting (Read 356 times)

"Modern man," said the Professor, "is only capable of understanding in terms of montage."

The words floated across the lectern and into my mind like a radio broadcast. He wasn't speaking to me, but to us; it's just I was the only one who came to class that day. You were out taking a nap in the sunshine. Everyone else must have been at the race.

The words felt right. Rational inquiry is the tool of choice in the excavation of truth, but speculative epistemology is what we do. Drilling holes deep into ideologies and dropping sticks of dynamite down to the bottom, blowing the fuck out of them on the off chance something shiny will pop out and nail us squarely between the eyes like a Bhakti of the Three Stooges.

I cannot say exactly what is down there, but truth makes me tingle just like the music when the hero finally steels his resolve and sets out to vanquish the enemy to whose advance he had all but resigned.

Spurious words are a dissonance. Among them, those I would most like to believe carry the subtlest diminutions.

Just like the music of the soundtracks of our lives. Depression has little to do with melody, everything to do with rhythm. The chord progression of your crisis of faith rings shrill and urgent over the conference table of your soul. (Now you know why meetings are held indoors.) The picture on the painted sheets that swaddled you since birth clashes with the scenery out here.

You and I are completely biased, of course, by virtue of having a nervous system. The world can only ever be containers and tubes, tubes that shuttle us between the containers. All the people-objects of the world are within.

You lift the painting and examine it. With the right picture frame you could accomplish a great deal of blending, mount it on a nonexistent and invisible wall which will nonetheless hold. You don't have to live inside the picture. There is scarcely room to breathe, inside the picture. Your every breath, heartbeat and act will be stolen by this picture, transformed into an homage to itself. If you should choose to reproduce, you will with child birth picture. And your children shall someday do the same.

But you were born into this, enfolded within this. What else do you have but mortality, futility? Without this draped over you, there is nothing to stop the wind but your naked flesh, and mine.

The painting asserts its reality precisely because its reality is not obvious. Faith is the cruelest game, the perpetual sense that you are losing everything. The house always wins.

The house always wins, and home is the container that you keep your life in.

Still, there is a measure of safety here in the suburbs of reality, where you are a not-so-obvious target for rogue metaphors. I urge you to hang the picture in the air. Let it be an anchor to this place, that in all your wanderings you have somewhere to return.

With faith and strength and underwear we stride into the sunset of our lives.